Come fly with me

Most Spectator readers no doubt know that this is the 100th anniversary of aviation and that the patriotic American brothers, Wilbur and Orville Wright, flew the world’s first aeroplane. I would imagine most of the readers have also heard of Charles Lindbergh, who was the first man to fly across the Atlantic in 1927. These names, along with Chuck Yeager, Buzz Aldrin and most recently Steve Fossett, join a host of other Americans who had ‘the Right Stuff’ and are etched into both the history of aviation as well as the imagination of every child enthusiast who looks up at the sky.

Sadly, virtually no one realises that this year is really the 150th anniversary of aviation. They would also be staggered to hear that the father of flight is not an American at all but a British landowner, entrepreneur and scientist called Sir George Cayley. On 5 July 1853 his loyal coachman was the first man to fly in an aircraft with a modern wing. The epic flight across Brompton Dale in Yorkshire was only one of his achievements (for example, he also founded Britain’s first polytechnic, invented the caterpillar tank track and was a pioneer of modern drainage systems) but by far the most spectacular. Sir George was, in fact, the first man to identify the four aerodynamic forces of flight – weight, lift, drag and thrust – and then describe concepts and elements of the modern aeroplane before going on to explain them in engineering terms. Somewhat unusually for pioneers, the Wright brothers themselves credited Sir George with the science behind their famous Wright Flyer and even described him as the father of aviation.

Isn’t it strange, then, that we are not celebrating the 150th anniversary here in Britain as opposed to the big events planned at Kittyhawk in the USA on 17 December? Is it not even stranger that more people in Britain have heard of Lindbergh than have heard of Alcock and Brown, who actually flew the Atlantic Ocean in 1919? When you think about it, it is even stranger that the closest Britain is coming to celebrating either 150 years of flight or even 100 years of powered flight is to allow a perfectly serviceable supersonic commercial aircraft to be chucked into the dustbin of history on the ostensible basis that some nasty French people won’t pay for some spares.